Slashdot Mirror
Security Research and Blackmail
harryjohnston alerts us to a story picked up by a few bloggers in the security space. A Russian security research company, Gleg, has discovered a zero-day in the latest version of RealPlayer 11. But they won't reveal details to Real, or to CERT, despite repeated requests. Details are available only to their clients who pay a lot of money for early access to such knowledge. To describe Gleg's business model Daniweb rather cautiously puts forward the word "blackmail." The story was first exposed in Ryan Nariane's Securitywach blog.
Seems fair they have information and want to be paid for it
I don't call it blackmail, I call it a free market...
Companies have a financial incentive for keeping their products secure, open source projects have less of an issue because the money just isn't in it.
All this is - is one company spending real money, hiring well paid analysis to plow through machine code or source code and analyse vulnerabilities.
The reason they can afford to do this is because the market is full of companies willing to pay for this stuff...
Thats where your code of ethics goes out of the window!
With open-source projects, there is still a market of companies using that software but at the same time there's a limited timespan before it's usually discovered by somebody else.
You know very well that if you advertise you've found a security flaw in open source XX product you're going to have hundereds of people scrutinising it and to develop a fix - because it's benificial to everybody (so the code of ethics lives strong).
It doesn't help that `Real' has a bad reputation, but by doing this and with holding it, Gleg are doing exactly what they set out to do in the first place and doing as any successful business man/woman does: identifying the market and targeting it appropriately.
This happens every day not just in software security, but in every other industry yet people just consider it a normal day in the office and maybe grumble a bit about it.
In an ideal situation ethics and social benifit would come first though... yet this is in practice incompatible with the free market, just for the reasons above.